From the Translators' Introduction
Like Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort remains an arrested work-in-progress, and for the same reason: it is not a mere novel but an entire universe, illimitable by its very nature. Martin du Gard understood this well and also saw the advantages of a jagged ending. A year after beginning Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, he wrote in his diary: "It is a work that can grow and be perfected indefinitely: a work which will never be finished for me yet which may at any moment be interrupted by my death.".....
Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is Martin du Gard's definitive autopsy of human behavior. It takes a certain mettle to open oneself to the full brunt of his inquest, but the reader who does so will find his fortitude lavishly rewarded and will undestand what Alber Camus meant when he called Roger Martin du Gard "our perpetual contemporary."
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From the Opening Chapter: The Origins of the Maumort Family
My sleep has always been light and intermittent. If I had kept an hourly log of my mental activity, it would in all likelihood turn out that I have spent many more nighttime than daytime hours engaged in thinking. These bouts of insomnia have taken a chronic character over the years: when I have slept four or five hours in a night off and on, I consider it to have been an exceptionally good one. I always have a pad of paper and a pencil within reach, to catch on the wing this turn of phrase which strikes me as felicitous, that idea which I hope to be able to examine more closely in the light of day. Adversity has its uses . . . . I will even admit that, all things considered, these forced meditations bring me more pleasure than annoyance. It is only at the end of night that I sometimes give in to impatience. All of my brethren in insomnia will, I think, know that anxiety which precedes the dawn, that interminably tiresome moment when one sits up every five minutes to see whether or not the day is going to decide to break, as at the end of a journey, at night, in a railway carriage, one constantly presses against the window to watch for the lights of the station where one is to arrive . . .
This morning I am eager to set-up a preliminary outline in accordance with the clear and almost panoramic vision which I had, last night, of my lifenot that I intend to follow this chronological order, but this outline will help me all the same.
The only sensible arrangement to adopt for Memoirs would obviously be chronological order. Last night it seemed to me that my existence could be divided into a certain number of parts.
But I am straying from the purpose that made me take up my pen this morning. And when one decides at my age to set about such an undertaking, there is no time to lose.
Here begin the Memoirs of Colonel Bertrand de Maumort, born right here at the Chateau du Saillant on the first of July, 1870. I have always had a very accurate memory; I've been lucky enough to have kept it intact: I count on it for carrying out the task that I embark upon today.